I partially agree with you - the answer to this question is pretty trivial in a larger sense. But so what? People have asked other trivial questions on this list also, such as "Did you like the movie X." This doesn't necessesarily mean they are "standing outside the struggle," or "indifferent both to concrete people and the dynamics of the social order."
Carrol also wrote:
>Immigrants are people, living in the nation to which the statistics
>occur.
>
>End of argument for any leftist.
>
>Their remain agitational and propaganda and organizational/tactical
>issues, but there is no question of fact or principle at issue here --
>unless you don't count immigrants as people.
Who annointed you Grand Poobah of the Left, such that you get to decide what debates are legitimate? Where do you get the idea that I don't consider immigrants to be people?
You can take your holier-than-thou attitude and shove it.
Angela wrote:
>What Nathan and Doug said, with only one small addition: the presumption
>of 'different populations' is a premise that requires more than repetition.
>Without that premise, nothing of what Brett insists on 'asking' makes any
>sense. That is, without that basic demographers' premise, the assertion
>would look like a tautology (poverty = poverty) instead of the discovery of
>a cause (immigrants = poverty). Someone should have changed the thread
>title to 'migrants import income disparities'.
>
>Demography is such bullshite. It doesn't matter whether you drain it of
>more explicitly xenophobic points of reference by transposing births/deaths
>for migrants, nor even if you depict an economy and labour market in the
>cartoonish terms of a deposit box of monies that come from some other
>imaginary place, as Nathan suggests. The relationship between population
>numbers and income disparity is a fiction that can only ever amount to, and
>is implicitly geared toward, 'solving' income disparities by 'solving' the
>'population problem', because it takes 'populations' to be _the_
>significant and explanatory variable in the first place. Here, everything
>remotely troublesome -- environmental degradation, income disparity,
>whatever else might emerge as a problem on the horizon of the policy wonk
>looking for an historically-intuited, apparently untroubling solution -- is
>reducible to 'populations'. Of course, by rendering something in the terms
>of 'populations', you get to create that crucial device of a
>policy-speak-for-troublesome-times: 'us' and 'them' in which even beginning
>to think about 'them' as those who own our skins sounds illogical by virtue
>of the fact that there are so few of them, how could they possibly be
>significant.
I think the burden of proof is on you to prove why demography is bullshite.
In one sense it is arbitrary to talk about populations - men/women, americans/foreigners, christians/muslims, whatever. We're all individuals.
But it is also possible to believe demography can help answer certain social questions. But this doesn't mean you have to buy into the all the stuff you seem to attribute to me which I happen to find repulsive. The word immigrant can simply stand for people who were not natural born citizens, it doesn't have to be symptomatic of an "us" vs. "them" mentality, or a belief that immigrants are insignificant.
Brett